Jenny Plague-Bringer(85)

Mariella nodded and wandered toward the next stone, looking dazed, but Jenny had successfully calmed her. Far ahead, Seth let out a high scream, loud enough to wake the French farmer on whose land they were trespassing.

“Seth! What’s wrong?” Jenny ran to catch up with him. He was gripping one of the standing stones and leaning against it, his eyes closed. She took his hand. “Seth, talk to me.”

“You tortured me!” His eyes flew open, and his mouth curled into a snarl. “You tortured me, Jenny.”

“Can you be more specific?” Jenny asked, thinking of too many past lives that he might be seeing. “Sorry.”

“Egypt,” he said. “I was an Egyptian swordsman, the best in the kingdom. I’d come home from battle without a scratch, and so would the men around me. But then you...and Alexander...invaded from Persia...”

“Cambyses,” Jenny remembered. “That was Alexander’s name. Son of Cyrus of Persia, the king of kings.”

“Cambyses and the famous ‘immortal’ swordsmen of Persia,” Seth said. “They were immortal enough. Undead. Not very skilled at fighting, but relentless and almost impossible to kill through their armor and shields. Thousands of them came into Egypt with you and Alexander. He conquered and declared himself pharaoh, making all the Egyptians worship him.”

“That’s very Alexander,” Jenny said.

“I didn’t know my touch would damage his zombies,” Seth said. “You and Alexander eventually hunted me down. You tortured me for months, letting me heal up each time, before you finally killed me. By then, I was begging to die.”

“I’m sorry, Seth.” She touched his face, but he pulled away and continued on down the row.

Mariella passed by, absorbed in her own vision. Jenny watched both of them wander ahead, absorbing their long line of past lives.

Something small and fast shot past Jenny’s eyes like a comet trailing smoke, and she gasped, getting a lungful of cold gas. It ricocheted from the stone beside her and landed in the grass between her feet. She had a quick glimpse of something like a kid’s smoke bomb, and then the gas rolled up over her legs like a fog.

Jenny ran towards Seth, trying to hold her breath, but she’d already taken a lungful of the stuff. Mariella was lost in her trance, but Seth saw Jenny coming and started toward her.

“No...not this...not this way...” Jenny said, but she couldn’t speak above a whisper. She felt like she was trying to run in quicksand, her legs dragging, all her muscles shutting down. More of the smoke-bomb devices rained down around her and around Seth. They weren’t actually smoke bombs, because smoke bombs didn’t come loaded with powerful tranquilizer gas.

A fog rose around Seth, and he staggered and slowed, then fell to one knee.

“Jennifer Morton,” a stern male voice said. “Don’t bother running. We’ve got you.” Men approached from the shadows of the stones with electric devices crackling in their hands, prepared to zap Jenny if the tranquilizer didn’t take her out.

Jenny tried to continue on toward Seth, but she lost her balance and toppled to the ground. As she lost consciousness, her last thought was a hope that the gas wouldn’t harm the baby.





Chapter Twenty-Four




Ward walked the observation deck at midnight, alone. The only lights were the dim glow from computer screens, which reflected in the armored glass windows overlooking the concrete bays of the laboratories below. Soon, things would really start to heat up around this old place.

He felt the sense of satisfaction that came with completing a difficult but necessary task. After he’d killed Senator Mayfield, it had only taken the shortest of talks with Eddie Cordell from Hale Security to make the rest of the arrangements. They’d monitored Jenny and Seth in their Paris apartment, learned of their planned trip to Brittany, and decided an ambush would run much more smoothly and quietly in the village of Carnac than in the center of Paris. Hale’s operatives had even helped in the capture of Seth and Jenny.

Now Ward had them all here: Tommy, already cooperating. Jenny and Seth, captured. As a bonus, he had a fourth paranormal, Mariella Visconti, who had the power to see a person’s future, according to the conversations Ward had heard in Jenny and Seth’s bugged apartment. It was a sticky bonus, though, because her family was influential in Italian politics. The last thing Ward needed was a complaint about his activities brought before some NATO panel by the Prime Minister of Italy. He would have to keep things quiet and work hard to gain Mariella’s cooperation.

They’d also captured Esmeralda Rios. Ward had tried on his own to convince her to join Tommy, but she’d refused, so they’d been forced to drug her and covertly transport her to Germany. Six paranormals, including himself, were now together under this roof, and it was time for his real work work to begin.